This Week In Tech: Linkedin Offers SlideShare Pro Features At No Cost

Saturday, August 23rd, 2014

SlideShare has become a widely adopted tool, especially amongst those in the business sector. It allows you to easily upload and share presentations with your audience. For example, we utilize SlideShare to aggregate presenter’s slides each year at our annual conference ForumCon. That way, those who are unable to attend are directed to one place to find each speaker’s slides.

In May of 2012 LinkedIn acquired SlideShare for $119 million. LinkedIn proclaimed this to be good news for all as it would enable professionals to share content more conveniently. Since the acquisition, SlideShare hadn’t gone through any significant changes, until now. SlideShare is canceling its pro tier memberships once priced at $19 and $49 dollars a month and making pro features available to all users.

So…why does this matter? When looking at the big picture, this is more than just all users having access to profile customization, private uploading, videos, and most importantly analytics. These analytics include how someone came across your SlideShare account, who they are, and where the majority of your traffic is originating. These engagement metrics provide a wealth of information to LinkedIn, note that SlideShare gets approximately 60 million unique visitors/month. After all, they made these features free for a reason. It will be interesting to continue watching LinkedIn’s advertising strategy for any changes that are a result of SlideShare Pro becoming a free tool for all.